NavBar

Saturday, March 13, 2010

A consistent error

I have a habit of making solutions more complicated than necessary because I spend much of my time working in the theoretical realm. My Specular Power shader is a perfect example. My solution has some advantage in allowing for more discrete transitions in the texture maps by using up to 4 color channels, but I have realized how unnecessary that is.

What I realized is this: my shader uses 4 color channels to combine 4 different specular power constants to the model. In theory, this allows for more flexibility and control. In reality, it creates a lot of unnecessary wrangling. After looking at some of the texture maps for recent Dominance War entries, I realized that it would much simpler and easier to find the maximum specular power you would need for the model, then use a single channel map to place the power at a percentage of that constant.

Solving problems is fun. Finding out you're wrong can be fun, too. Especially when it leads to even better solutions.